The Carolina Theatre in Chapel Hill was the setting Monday night for a special advance screening of “MacGruber,” the new Saturday Night Live skit-turned-movie. The screening was open only to Carolina students, and was part of a national college tour in support of the film. The event drew a sold out crowd of enthusiastic young fans, all buzzing with anticipation for what would turn out to be the funniest, edgiest and most mature SNL film to date.
And the best part – the film’s director, Jorma Taccone, star Ryan Philippe, screenwriter John Solomon and MacGruber himself, Will Forte, were on hand to do a Q&A session after the screening.
“This college tour has been planned for a while,” Taccone said, “But we were all really excited about it so we made them expand it.”
In addition to the star-studded Chapel Hill screening, N.C. State also had a sneak peek showing of the film in Witherspoon Theatre. There were no celebrity appearances at State, but although it’s no consolation, clips of the MacGruber SNL skits were shown before the film, an addition that UNC cannot boast.
Taccone regretted the fact they couldn’t make it to the N.C. State showing. “We wish we could go to all of the places showing the film,” Taccone said. The two events, unfortunately, were scheduled at the same time.
The tour, which visited five schools in five days, traveled to the University of Indiana the next morning. Before their departure, however, I had a chance to sit down with the guys at their hotel for a private interview about the film.
We first discussed our impressions of the film, which is absolutely hilarious, yet never devolves into abject silliness. It is built around a core of solid characters you can actually care about, each with a funny yet meaningful back story that adds depth to the film.
“This isn’t ‘It’s Pat,'” Taccone said, referring to the biggest dud in the history of SNL movie adaptations. “[MacGruber] is a lot different than you’d expect, from an SNL film in particular. We’re all really excited about it. It’s much raunchier than you might expect, from what we were allowed to show in the trailer. I think it was maybe like a tenth of the film that we were allowed to show,” Taccone said, laughing. “We really put our all into it, and we didn’t conform in any way when making it.”
“The movie has a definite edge,” added Philippe, “and it’s a hard ‘R’, which I think is a major departure from any of the previous SNL films. So there’s nothing flat about it. It’s got a lot of energy and edge, which I think sets it apart a little bit.”
“That’s a much better sound byte,” Taccone said, and everyone laughed.
“I think because it’s SNL,” Forte said, “people tend to have an opinion one way or another before they’ve even seen the movie. I think we’d like to just go around and tell people to have an open mind.”
This is solid advice. When the film is released May 21, audiences should certainly expect the unexpected, including a scene involving a stick of celery and a character’s rear end. Bathroom humor also abounds, as do sundry sexual innuendos and uncomfortable one-liners. The film earns every bit of its ‘R’ rating, something that will probably make college students very happy.
“I think the other thing about it,” Philippe said, “is that it’s the kind of movie we all would want to see, you know, especially if we were in college. It just hits that demographic and there’s something young about it. You can feel in the film the fact that we all loved making it.”
“That’s exactly how it was written as well,” Taccone said. “It’s like, we’ve been given this opportunity, let’s do exactly what we want to do. That’s how we shot it, that’s how we wrote it and edited it. And at every stage, we always assumed somebody would tell us ‘no,’ but that never happened.”
In fact, getting to turn “MacGruber” into a movie in the first place was something the creators thought would never happen. “Certain things that we’d write for the show would be too raunchy for an SNL sketch,” Forte said, “and we would jokingly say, ‘oh, save it for the movie,’ not in a million years thinking that there’d ever be a movie to put it into.”
“Now all of those things, I don’t think we ever remembered a single one of them,” Forte added. “None of those things are actually in the movie now. But in the back of our heads, a fictional movie existed for a long time.”
The genesis of the film occurred when someone approached SNL Producer Lorne Michaels about a commercial that aired during the 2009 Super Bowl featuring MacGruber and Richard Dean Anderson. Anderson played a character called “MacGyver” on an 80’s TV show that served as the inspiration for the MacGruber sketches.
“That [commercial] is how it all sort of started,” Forte said.
Once the project was green lit, however, new concerns became apparent. The film had to be shot in a matter of 29 days due to various actors’ scheduling conflicts, and the budget was set firmly at $20 million dollars.
“In the writing process we’d write these huge scenes,” Taccone said.
“With like, two helicopters, and explosions,” Forte added. “And the producer would say to us, ‘you can’t do that! This is a 20 million dollar movie. We can’t afford helicopters.'”
Another apparent challenge was finding just the right person to play the straight man to MacGruber’s chaotic hilarity. Ryan Philippe, by his own admission, seems at first like an odd choice.
“I guess whosever idea it was to cast me,” Philippe said, “was kind of like, ‘let’s get a guy who plays soldiers for real,’ because I was in the Eastwood movie (“Flags of our Fathers”), and the Kimberly Peirce movie (“Stop-Loss”). I went to the read-through, and I’ve always been a closet comedy geek. I was a huge SNL fan, and a huge fan of Will’s… and that’s kind of where it all started.”
“A lot of times on the set of a drama, things are tense and you have to stay in the mood of the scene,” Philippe said. “But [on MacGruber], I would laugh from morning to night. I’d see them pitch ideas to each other before we went and did a take, and the freedom that came with that, and how light it was, was something I needed personally and professionally. I’d get to laugh and enjoy myself instead of beating myself up through the whole day.”
“It was amazing to me that [Philippe] had never done comedy before,” Forte said, “‘cause he was just so aligned with the tone of the movie, and his timing was always really good. I’ve said this before, but I really think he’s the M.V.P. of the movie because he holds the whole thing together and makes it believable.”
The remainder of my conversation with the “MacGruber” crew ran the gamut, covering topics ranging from Ke$ha’s recent SNL performance, to the high score Forte scored playing “Naked Photo Hunt” at a bar on Franklin Street. But the one thing that remained constant throughout was the very hip and current sense of humor on display. It is this cutting edge approach to comedy that makes “MacGruber,” and these guys’ various SNL skits, the comedy gold they are.
“MacGruber” hits theatres everywhere May 21 and is destined to change a lot of people’s minds about what a Saturday Night Live movie can be. Taccone, Philippe, Solomon and Forte have worked tirelessly to make sure “MacGruber” is better than it should be, now it’s up to audiences to decide if they succeeded.
